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Friday, March 25, 2011

Big IQ Kids! TOS Review.

"Helping kids become and stay A+ students!"

Big IQ Kids.com is an online game site for kids to practice and learn important school skills. They have games and lessons that teach Math, Spelling, Vocabulary, and US geography/facts. Each sections is customizable, and set up to adjust to your child's skill level. The math program reviews math facts(as well as other math skills) and starts out easy with adding by 1's, and 2's. If your child can answer those easily he/she is moved up to the next level. You can also set the program to work on specific math skills. I was excited that I was able to put in my own spelling lists for Buster, or use the ones they have preloaded. It was nice to be able to use their spelling games to re-enforce our own spelling lessons. Buster was especially fond of the US states program, and spent a lot of time playing it. I was very pleased with how much he learned about the states from it. Kids can click on any state to learn more about it, practice spelling state names and abbreviations, and also practice locating states on a map. At the end of each lesson students are taken to a game menu, and allowed to use tokens they earn to play short fun games. Some of the games we found a bit odd, such as one were a man was riding a bike in his underwear. Before you get too freaked out these were very small cartoon drawings. I honestly didn't even notice until Sweetpea pointed it out to me. One other thing I found a strange about the program in general was the computerized voices. They did not seem to bother Buster or hinder his learning experience. Below you can see an image of the main screen for Big IQ kids:

From what I gathered on their site you can access all of the game types for free, or purchase a premium membership. People with premium memberships have extended access, are able to track the progress of their students, and have limited adds on their pages and none during game play. Big IQ kids even sends progress updates to parents via email. Their pricing varies depending on what programs you want, so go to this link to find out the pricing that applies to you. If Big IQ kids interests you at all be sure and head over to their site, and at least try it for free.

Pros:
Fun
Customizable
Progress reports
Educational

Cons:
Strange computerized voices.
A few odd games in the free game play.

Access to Big IQ kids was given to me free of charge in exchange for my honest review. No other compensation was given.

2 comments:

I might try that one...The only computer skill Durin has thus far is mousing/clicking. Is this okay for that? We've purposefully delayed computer time, but I'm thinking it's especially time for him to do more.

"And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. Deut 6:6-7 (NKJV)